Quotes about Psalms

I love goodness and hate evil. My favorite verse in the Bible is 'Those of you who love God—hate evil' (Psalms 97:10).

Joy explodes throughout the book of Psalms like fireworks, and is the most potent anti-missile defense system there is.

Romans contains some seventy-four references to the Old Testament (mostly from Psalms and Isaiah). "It is written" occurs nineteen times in this book, more than half of all the times Paul uses the phrase.

But a cluster containing night's darkness and blood-dripping wounds, And psalms of the dead.

It was huge to read the Proverbs of the day every morning, it was huge to read the Psalm of the day every morning and to get that in us and get us going before the day even started.

Still today the Old Testament book of Psalms gives great power for faith and life. This is simply because it preserves a conceptually rich language about God and our relationships to him. If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life.

What makes the language great and provides the emotional lift is chiefly its picture of God and of life. We learn from the psalms how to think and act in reference to God. We drink in God and God's world from them. They provide a vocabulary for living Godward, one inspired by God himself. They show us who God is, and that expands and lifts and directs our minds and hearts.

For this purpose we will benefit most from the great passages of scripture that clearly show us our Father in relation to his creation and his earthly family. These are passages such as Genesis 1 or 15; Exodus 19; 1 Kings 8; 2 Chronicles 16 and 19; Nehemiah 9; many of the psalms (34, 37, 91, and 103, for example); Isaiah 30, 44, and 56—66; Luke 11; Romans 8; Philippians 4.

For God has willed to make Himself known to us in the mystery of the Psalms.

If we are to pray well, we too must discover the Lord to whom we speak, and if we use the Psalms in our prayer we will stand a better chance of sharing in the discovery which lies hidden in their words for all generations. For God has willed to make Himself known to us in the mystery of the Psalms.

St. Augustine adds that God has taught us to praise Him, in the Psalms, not in order that He may get something out of this praise, but in order that we may be made better by it.

Monastic people have long known--and I've experienced it in a small way myself--that the communal reciting, chanting, and singing of the psalms brings a unique sense of wholeness and order to their day, and even establishes the rhythm of their lives.